Stewart's (and the Left's) Perpetual Whine

I omitted the following from the Stewart-Soderberg exchange:

Do you think they're the guys to--do they understand what they've unleashed? Because at a certain point, I almost feel like, if they had just come out at the very beginning and said, "Here's my plan: I'm going to invade Iraq. We'll get rid of a bad guy because that will drain the swamp"--if they hadn't done the whole "nuclear cloud," you know, if they hadn't scared the pants off of everybody, and just said straight up, honestly, what was going on, I think I'd almost--I'd have no cognitive dissonance, no mixed feelings.

It's sort of funny that Jon Stewart thinks this plan was hidden from him, when the very language he now uses to describe the plan -- "drain the swamp" -- comes directly from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Bush and administration officials talked up the possibility of reform in Iraq sparking much-needed changes in the Middle East for years. Liberals just chose to ignore those statements, as they didn't have a Joe Wilson type who could report back from drinking sweet mint tea that the scheme was simply impossible.

I was, and remain, skeptical of the "Plymouth, Iraq" theory, as one on-line correspondent is fond of calling it.

But I was always aware that it could work-- that Al Jazeera, for example, might run lots of coverage of Iraqis debating and drafting their own constitution, and that the Arab/Muslim world might be fascinated by seeing Arabs and Muslims practicing real democracy, and yearn for a better political life for themselves. (As it turns out, the Iraqi elections and protests in Lebanon have already sparked Arab and Muslim interest in the possibility of reform... just wait until the constitution begins being drafted.)

Even though I was a skeptic, I was also aware that you can't beat something with nothing. For all their blather about the "root causes" of terrorism, I don't seem to recall any truly workable liberal plans to address these root causes, apart from "opening channels of dialogue" and paying off terrorists and doing everything that Dominique De Villepain wants us to do.

it seems that only the neocons actually proposed a method of addressing those "root causes" that could, in theory, maybe kinda sorta possibly work at all.

So I was on-board with the plan. I didn't think it would necessarily work, but I knew that something had to be tried -- we had to do something to try to change the course of the Arab/Muslim world from its suicidal path of relentless megaterrorism confrontation with the West -- before we tried Plan B.

And Plan B would not be pretty. After WWII, it was debated seriously whether Germany ought to be forcibly deindustrialized-- that is, have all its industry destroyed and not allowed to be rebuilt. Forced into an eighteenth-century existance of a purely agrarian economy.

We avoided Plan B for Germany with the Marshall Plan and by guiding the Germans to democracy-- and peacefulness.

The liberation of Iraq is Bush's attempt to avoid Plan B for the terrorist-spawning Muslim world.

It's quite annoying to have liberals claim now that they were "misled" about one of the main arguments for liberating Iraq. We made this argument repeatedly; they dismissed it out-of-hand as pure fantasy, unwilling to even consider it.

If they honestly don't remember hearing about it, that's only because they dismissed it so knee-jerkedly in the first place.

Well, you were told. Stop claiming this is all some after-the-fact concoction of KKKarl Rove's.

As Instapundit notes, it seems the Lebanese sort of got the connection between Iraq and Middle East freedom: